The internet continues to expand as a source of information gathering and information distribution. Businesses increasingly market, sell, support, and offer information about products to potential customers via the internet. To provide support to such companies approaches have been developed which provide information about how web sites are used by visitors/potential customers. How a business's web site is viewed by visitors can provide important marketing information. When a visitor, or potential prospect, enters a web site of a business, the business both knows the visitor is interested in the business, product, or service, and a point of contact with the potential customer is established.
One prior approach for acquiring marketing information from web site use was to utilize information from web servers. To obtain relevant data, however, software was either required to be installed at a web server, software and/or hardware was required to have access to the web server, or instrumentation code was required to be embedded in a company's web page. Each approach was far from ideal. In order for the above approaches to be implemented, significant time, money, and personnel are required to both install and debug such systems. Further, the approaches require constant maintenance and monitoring which can severely impact both the reliability and efficiency of the web server.
A less intrusive, but also less informative, approach to supplying information about the use of a web site by a visitor, is referred to as “entrance tracking.” Entrance tracking captures a first click, or entrance, to a web site and keeps track of the number of first clicks. For example, Google offers AdWords, which is a pay-per-click advertisement system. To implement entrance tracking under AdWords, when a link is created for a Google advertisement, a unique identifier is attached to the link. When the link is selected, a web server records the selection along with the unique identifier before immediately redirecting the visitor/customer to the target website. Because the approach only records the first click, it fails to provide valuable information about how a website is used by a potential customer.
Therefore, using the approaches described above, companies are not afforded a full picture of how their web site is being used by potential customers, nor do they realize valuable marketing information, which can be acquired directly from a point of contact with an interested potential customer.